The Political Scene: The Power of No

In this week’s Political Scene podcast, George Packer and Peter J. Boyer discuss the surprising resurgence of the Republican Party. Boyer points to the 2010 Senate race in Pennsylvania, where Pat Toomey, who Karl Rove once thought too conservative to win, is ahead of now Democrat Arlen Specter in the polls. There are also severalrecent Gallup polls suggesting that the country is still predominately conservative. Boyer says that this has encouraged the Republicans to stick with being the “party of no”:

The larger thing, I think, is an awakening on the part of the public and also, particularly, the political class, to the reality that the election last November did not signal a fundamental realignment towards the left…. I think that President Obama and the congressional Democrats may well have done more to rehabilitate the Republican Party and, indeed, conservative doctrine, than Republicans themselves might have achieved in a generation.

Packer and Boyer also discuss the election in Afghanistan, and the American public’s declining support for the war there, with guest host Curtis Fox.